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Gods and Generals Review

By:
Kit Bowen
Feb 21, 2003

From the creators of the TNT miniseries Gettysburg including executive producer Ted Turner and writer/director Ronald F. Maxwell Gods chronicles the Civil War from its beginnings when the South rises up. Confederate General Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall) a distinguished military man but also a loyal native Virginian chooses to fight for his home rather than his country while Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang) a devoutly religious man becomes Lee's most trusted lieutenant. On the other side we have Colonel Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) a professor from Maine who ends up one of the Union's finest military leaders. In between there are glimpses of the wives and families left behind. Stories of this magnitude with their dramatic bloody battles and tragic endings usually leave you numb or crying for those lives lost and destroyed. Instead Gods and Generals holds no resonance whatsoever meticulously plotting out the details and making this decisive moment in American history interminable at three and a half hours. It's like wading through a textbook--or worse watching Civil War fanatics carefully reenact the famous battle scenes on the very ground they were fought over and over again--while the players stand around quoting long-winded verse from the Bible or Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Blech.
The actors in Gods and Generals must have honestly thought they were making something important when they signed up. Main players Lang (who played Major Gen. George Pickett in Gettysburg) and Daniels (who reprises his Gettysburg role as Chamberlain) have their moments but after hearing them recite one speech after another especially Lang's Jackson who says more prayers to God than anything else you start to wonder if they ever realized they made a mistake. (Or have we for sitting through it?) One of the more superfluous scenes is when Jackson and his black cook Jim played by Frankie Faison are standing outside in the freezing cold night for about 15 minutes both looking up at the stars and praying to God. It seems like the actors are trying to make such sermonizing poignant meaningful but all this pontification simply drags the movie further down. These speeches aren't just Lang's and Daniels' territory--Mira Sorvino as Chamberlain's wife and Kali Rocha as Jackson's wife get their own personal moments in the sun too. If you count the cast of thousands each with their own things to say well you get the point. Thankfully Duvall who is the only good thing about the movie gets to keep the talking to a minimum.
If you want to see a Civil War melodrama at its best where watching the heroes race through a sacked city makes you hold your breath and witnessing horrific hospital scenes makes you squirm then watch Gone With the Wind. If you want gut-wrenching Civil War battles or more understanding of how slaves truly felt then watch Glory. If you want a heartening history lesson about the Civil War that not only teaches you about the era's political machinations but also shares the insights and thoughts of the men and women who experienced it then watch Ken Burns' documentary series The Civil War. Gods and Generals offers none of that in its dry textbook version of the Civil War which uses the same shots are used over and over again (how many times does the camera pan up to the night sky or show the panoramic view of Fredericksburg Virginia? I lost count) features more actors waxing prophetic than real drama and actually makes you yawn during what should be intense battle scenes.

Top Story
With the tremendous success of their film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Warner Bros. may reach $1 billion this year in total box office grosses, making it the second time the studio has reached that mark in three years. Potter has grossed approximately $176 million in two weeks and along with the other three top Warner grosses this year--Cats &amp; Dogs ($93.4 million), Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence ($78.6 million) and Training Day ($75 million)--helped drive the studio's 2001 total domestic take to $960 million. If the trend continues to the end of the year, especially with the release of The Majestic with Jim Carrey and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, Warner Bros. may beat the single-year distributor record of $1.26 billion set by Sony in 1997.
Deaths
Author John Knowles, best known for his 1959 novel A Separate Peace, died Thursday in a convalescent home in a Fort Lauderdale suburb. He was 75. The novel, a moving story about adolescence, is considered an American literary classic. Sisters Dorothy Maxwell, Marjorie Johnson and a brother, James Knowles, survive Knowles.
Honored
Spanish actor Antonio Banderas will receive the first Anthony Quinn Achievement Award at the 10th Annual Latin American Film Festival. The event will take place next April in Providence, Rhode Island, the final resting place of Quinn, who died in June at the age of 86.
Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, an exiled Chinese writer, playwright and painter, received an honorary literature doctorate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Thursday, with no acknowledgment from the local officials. Gao, whose works are banned in China, left the country in 1987 and renounced his membership to the Communist Party after the Tiananmen Square conflict in 1989.
In General
Anglophile Madonna and husband Guy Ritchie have booked the same Scottish estate, Skibo Castle, where they were married for their first wedding anniversary, London's tabloid The Sun reports. They invited close friends to relive the moment with them and have taken every room in the enchanted castle to ensure their privacy.
Book guru Oprah Winfrey has chosen the award-winning novel A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry for this month's coveted Oprah Book Club logo. This new choice comes after her controversial pick of Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections in September, which Franzen pooh-poohed. Still, her endorsement virtually guarantees hundreds of thousands in sales for any book she chooses.
Regis Philbin, the mainstay host of the once popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, may bow out of his primetime responsibilities to join the new syndicated version of the game slated for launch in the fall. Philbin predicted the game show, which has taken some hard hits in the ratings of late, would be pulled out of primetime and "then [ABC] will bring it back with a comedian...They want it to become a comedy show."
The entertainment industry is bracing themselves for the release of the Federal Trade Commission's report card next week on the industry's efforts to curb the marketing of violence to children. It's expected the film industry will pull in some top marks, while the music industry may once again get slammed.
Actress Pia Zadora has filed for divorce from her second husband, writer-director Jonathan Kaufer, citing irreconcilable differences. Zadora, 46, is seeking full custody of the couple's 4-year-old son.